Thomas Adès has never been the most prolific of contemporary composers, and his premieres are always special events. New pieces on the scale of his Totentanz, which the composer himself introduced with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Christianne Stotijn and Simon Keenlyside as the soloists, are rarer still; lasting 35 minutes, it's the longest piece he has composed for the concert hall to date.

The anonymous text of Adès's dance of death comes from a 30-metre-long painted cloth, now destroyed, that used to hang in a church in Lübeck, in north Germany. It showed death linking hands with a cross-section of human society, while in the words beneath he addresses them each in turn, working his way through the medieval hierarchy, beginning with the pope and the emperor and ending with a maiden and a child, insisting each of them joins his lethal dance.

In Adès's piece the baritone is death's mouthpiece - declamatory, angular and rather Bergian (the opening of the work very much recalls the prologue to Lulu), with just a few moments of insidious quietness, while the mezzo, more lyrical, more vulnerable, represents the victims who vainly try to resist him. Throughout their exchanges the orchestral machine moves relentlessly on, constantly changing tack and inventing new sound-worlds but always keeping its power in reserve, and consuming everything it encounters. In the closing pages death and humanity seem to reach a truce in a passage of almost Straussian lyricism, Adès's most frankly expressive music to date, but it proves only temporary and the work ends in the lowest depths of the orchestra, having worked its way downwards.

Simon Keenlyside performs in the world premiere of Thomas Adès’s Totentanz, conducted by the composer at the BBC Proms. Photograph: BBC/Chris Christodoulou BBC/Chris Christodoulou/BBC

The performance was wonderfully compelling, with the BBCSO revelling in the virtuoso challenges Adès sets them, and the soloists giving their roles an almost operatic vividness. In the hall Stotijn's and Keenlyside's words were hard to decipher even with discreet amplification; listening again online later, the radio balance was much better.

Totentanz is dedicated to the memory of Lutoslawski, and before the premiere, Adès conducted a performance of one of the Polish composer's greatest achievements, the Cello Concerto he completed in 1970 for Rostropovich. Paul Watkins was the soloist here, wonderfully contained and stoically insistent in a work that depicts the cello as a heroic, unflinching champion of individuality against the threats and menace of the orchestra.

There was music from another of this year's centenarians too, for Adès had begun with Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, unleashing its fury with frightening vividness, as if anticipating the dance of death that would come later.